HMS Indefatigable (R10): Back Flying Aircraft 37 Minutes After a Kamikaze Strike

The Third of Her Class

HMS Indefatigable was an Implacable-class fleet aircraft carrier, sister ship to HMS Implacable, sharing the same fundamental design philosophy of a heavily armoured flight deck and hangar that had already proven its worth aboard earlier ships of the wider Illustrious lineage.

Built by John Brown & Company at Clydebank, she was laid down on 3 November 1939, launched on 8 December 1942 and completed on 3 May 1944, displacing 32,110 long tons at deep load, measuring 766 feet 6 inches overall and capable of a brisk 32.5 knots.

She entered service in the closing years of the Second World War and, like her sister, was rushed into the demanding operational tempo of the British Pacific Fleet's campaign against Japan.

She and Implacable were also the odd pair in the British carrier fleet, and for a reason that had nothing to do with how they were handled. Both were laid down in 1939, both took nearly five years to finish because carrier construction kept giving way to more urgent work, and both were redesigned on the slip in a way that left them with two hangars of only fourteen feet of headroom. That was too low for the Corsair, the best fighter the Allies had, so where the other British carriers in the Pacific flew American aircraft, Indefatigable went to war with the largest wing of Seafires in the fleet: a superb aeroplane, an indifferent naval one, and short of range into the bargain. The whole story of that design decision, and what it eventually cost both ships, is in the article on HMS Implacable (R86).

She had in fact been in action a good deal earlier than the Pacific, and against the same target that had occupied the Home Fleet for two years. Her very first operational sortie was Operation Mascot on 17 July 1944, when she launched forty-three aircraft against Tirpitz in Kaafjord alongside the veterans Formidable and Furious. It achieved nothing whatever: the force was picked up on radar long before it arrived, and by the time the Barracudas were over the fjord the Germans had the smoke generators going and the target had disappeared into a grey blanket. She went back through the second half of August for Operation Goodwood, flying Fireflies of 1770 Squadron and Hellcats of 1840 against the anchorage, the oil storage and the barracks, with much the same result. It was frustrating work for a brand-new carrier, and it is worth remembering when reading about the Fleet Air Arm's Pacific record: her air groups had already been shot at over a Norwegian fjord for two months before anybody in the Pacific had heard of her.

A Kamikaze on Easter Sunday

Before any of that, Indefatigable had already seen serious action. In January 1945 she took part in Operation Meridian, the two-part strike on the Japanese-held oil refineries at Palembang in Sumatra, flying alongside HMS Illustrious, HMS Indomitable and HMS Victorious in an attack that cut the refineries' output by roughly three-quarters at a stage of the war when aviation fuel was becoming desperately scarce for Japan.

Palembang is worth pausing on because it was the most strategically important thing the Fleet Air Arm did in the whole war and it was not cheap. The two refineries there produced roughly half of Japan's oil and about three quarters of her aviation spirit; the two strikes cut Sumatran output to about a third of normal and cost forty-one aircraft and thirty aircrew killed, with nine more captured and murdered by their captors after the surrender. The full account of the operation, and of the men remembered as the Palembang Nine, is in the article on HMS Illustrious (87).

A rather less glamorous crisis struck in Sydney that February, when a fire broke out in her Engineers' Office on the 13th; emergency repairs kept her in harbour until the 27th, a brief but unwelcome delay before she rejoined the fleet for what would prove to be a considerably more dramatic month.

HMS Indefatigable's defining moment came at 07:28 on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, while operating off Sakishima Gunto near Okinawa. A Japanese Zeke fighter-bomber, carrying a 550-pound bomb, pressed home an attack despite being intercepted by Royal Navy Seafires flown by Sub Lieutenant R.H. Reynolds and John Birtle, the latter having only just taken off from the carrier's own deck; Birtle's gun camera later confirmed his cannon fire had struck the enemy aircraft, which appeared to break apart mid-dive, yet the pilot still managed to reach the ship.

Aiming to dive straight down her funnel, he instead struck the flight deck at the point where it joined the island superstructure, hitting the forward crash barrier.

The impact depressed the armoured flight deck by around three inches over a fifteen-foot area, destroyed the radio office, flight-deck sick bay and pilot's briefing room, damaged two Avengers and a Firefly parked nearby, and started fires that spread across the steel deck and into the island itself.

The human cost was heavy: 14 men were killed, eight instantly and six more later of their wounds, including the ship's Lieutenant Commander (Flying), her Air Engineering Officer and the Flight Deck Medical Officer, with a further 32 wounded.

Witness accounts of the scene were remarkably harrowing, one able seaman found his gun sight clogged with human remains, and searchers could find only a single fragment of the kamikaze pilot himself.

It is worth understanding what she had just been hit by, because the kamikaze was not a stunt and it was not madness. The Special Attack Units were formed in October 1944 out of a cold calculation: Japan had lost most of her experienced pilots, her new ones could not survive against American fighters long enough to press home a conventional attack, and a semi-trained man in an obsolete aircraft with a bomb strapped on could still reach a ship if he did not intend to come back. It was appallingly effective. Off Okinawa the Japanese mounted ten mass attacks, called kikusui, floating chrysanthemums, and flew somewhere in the region of nineteen hundred suicide sorties in three months, sinking or wrecking dozens of ships and killing several thousand Allied sailors. It was also the reason the Royal Navy's armoured decks suddenly stopped looking like an eccentric British obsession and started looking like foresight. And it should not be sentimentalised in either direction: the young man who hit Indefatigable at half past seven on Easter Sunday was doing something no navy should ask of anybody, and he killed fourteen people doing it.

Flying Again in 37 Minutes

HMS Indefatigable's armoured design proved its worth in spectacular fashion: ruptured high-pressure steam pipes in the island helped smother the flames within four minutes, and remarkably, the ship resumed flight operations just 37 minutes after being struck, landing her first Seafire at 08:16 with only a single crash barrier still working.

It was a properly staggering recovery time that stood in stark contrast to the fate of American carriers hit by similar attacks, prompting one anonymous United States Navy liaison officer to offer what became one of the most quoted lines of the entire Pacific War: 'When a kamikaze hits a US carrier, it's six months repair at Pearl. In a Limey carrier it's a case of sweepers, man your brooms.'

HMS Indefatigable's damaged armoured plates and structural steelwork were fully replaced within six days at San Pedro Bay, Leyte, by the Fleet Train repair ships HMS Artifex and HMS Resource, restoring her flight deck to full operational condition, a particularly remarkable feat of forward repair work that kept her in the fighting line for the remainder of the campaign against Japan.

Six days to replace armour plate is the part of that story that ought to astonish people, and almost nobody notices it. San Pedro Bay in Leyte is about eight thousand miles from the nearest British dockyard. There was no dry dock, no crane wharf and no steel stockyard; there was a fleet anchorage in the Philippines and a collection of converted merchant ships. HMS Artifex and HMS Resource were repair ships of the British Fleet Train, floating workshops with machine shops, foundries, plate rolls and several hundred artificers, and they cut out the damaged armour of a fleet carrier's flight deck and put new plate in, afloat, in under a week. The Royal Navy had to invent that entire organisation from nothing in 1944 because the Americans, quite reasonably, declined to supply a second fleet in the Pacific; how it was done is described in the article on HMS Berry Head (A191). Without it, one kamikaze would have sent Indefatigable back to Sydney for a month.

The War's Last Days

Indefatigable stayed in the fighting line right through to the very end. On 15 August 1945, the day Japan's surrender was announced, her aircraft were still attacking targets in the Tokyo area; during the ceasefire broadcast itself a lone Japanese dive bomber made an unsuccessful attack on the carrier, and three days later, on 18 August, a floating mine detonated close to her starboard side without causing any damage, a suitably eventful way to see out a war that had never given her much of a quiet moment.

The last day deserves its own paragraph, because her aircraft fought what is generally reckoned the final air combat of the Second World War, and it has a bitter ending. Early on 15 August 1945 three Seafires of 887 Squadron and four of 894 went off to escort Avengers and Fireflies against Kisarazu airfield, about thirty miles south of Tokyo, on what everybody expected to be the Fleet Air Arm's last strike. Twelve Zekes came down through the cloud at them. In the fight that followed the Seafires shot down eight of the twelve for the loss of one of their own, which was by a distance the best day the Seafire ever had. The one loss was Sub Lieutenant Fred Hockley, aged twenty-two, who baled out unhurt over Chiba, came down in a field, was picked up by a member of the civil defence and handed over to the local infantry regiment. The Emperor's broadcast announcing the surrender went out at noon that day. Hockley was murdered that evening, hours after the war had officially ended. Two of the men responsible were tried and hanged in September 1947. He is one of the very last British servicemen to die in the Second World War.

Postwar and the End

HMS Indefatigable returned to the United Kingdom in early 1946 and spent the rest of that year on trooping and repatriation duties, ferrying servicemen and civilians home before being reduced to reserve. She was recommissioned in 1950 as a training ship with the Home Fleet Training Squadron, conducting deck-landing instruction with non-flying mock-ups and simulators rather than live aircraft, and made a series of overseas port visits in that role.

A training carrier with no aeroplanes sounds like a contradiction and was in fact a sensible use of a ship nobody could afford to run properly. By 1950 she could not operate the aircraft the Navy actually had: her hangars were too low for jets, her lifts were too small and her deck was not strong enough, and modernising her would have cost close to the price of a new carrier. What she could still do was be a large, seaworthy ship full of accommodation, workshops and a flight deck, which is exactly what you need for training several hundred young sailors at a time. So she spent four years taking boys to sea, letting them practise deck handling on mock-ups and simulators, and showing the flag in foreign ports, which is a modest but genuinely valuable end for a ship. Her sister was doing the same thing at the same time. Both were gone within a year of each other.

The Board of Admiralty judged her surplus to requirements in early 1954, and she was paid off on 3 September that year into Class III reserve at Rosyth. She was sold for scrap the following year, though the job itself took its time: Indefatigable was finally broken up between November 1956 and April 1959, closing out the career of a carrier whose armoured flight deck had, on at least one unforgettable Easter Sunday, done exactly what it was designed to do.

Her whole operational life lasted about fourteen months, from a fruitless strike on a battleship hiding under a smoke screen in a Norwegian fjord to a dogfight over Tokyo on the morning the war ended. In between she helped take the aviation fuel away from the Japanese air forces, took a suicide aircraft on the flight deck and was flying again inside the hour, lost fourteen men in a few seconds and had her armour replaced by a floating workshop in the Philippines. She was never modernised, never refitted for jets and never really needed again, and she paid off after ten years, having spent a good deal more of her life in reserve or alongside than in action. It is not a long story. It is, for the men who were aboard on Easter Sunday 1945 and on the last morning of the war, a very large one.